The Lunatic Express (2 page)

Written in 1930 by a roving correspondent who covered the Russian Revolution, married Leon Trotsky’s secretary, and cruised the Baltic in a twenty-foot catboat, that passage captured the birth of wanderlust better than any I’ve read since. A boat. An island. A journey. The idea arises unbidden. It takes hold and you can’t shake it. Nothing else seems worth thinking about. “Why are you doing this?” asked my friends. They couldn’t fathom it. They saw my journey as some sort of masochism, and the conveyances as a self-imposed death sentence. People stopped calling me days before I even left. They didn’t offer condolences or sympathy or even good luck. They just hid, as if I’d gone nuts, as if they were embarrassed for me and didn’t know what to say. “Poor Carl,” I could imagine them saying, “he’s so lost he’s gone off to kill himself the slow way.”

But I had a sense that the timing was right, the moment had come. Accelerating after the Amelia Earhart expedition, I’d traveled more and more; my days had become a series of flights out and back, each one leaving me ever more comfortable in strange places. Now I needed to do something huge, to jar myself out of my life—and that was what long journeys did best. There remained so much I still wanted to know and see in the world, and I hoped that I might come home with fresh eyes.

A
S THE BUS LURCHED
through D.C. traffic and the industrial wasteland of far eastern D.C.’s New York Avenue, my anxiety began to lift, like the passing of a summer squall on the Chesapeake Bay. Ahead of me was possible misery and maybe danger, but also adventure, the unknown, a feeling that I was about to live deeply. I realized how lucky I was. I was bracing for anything and everything and, who knows, there was the chance a long journey on the worst conveyances might transport me to somewhere altogether new.

I was starting slowly on a circuitous route that had me heading north before going south. I wanted to get to South America, and one airline stood out: Cubana Airlines, which had one of the worst safety records in the skies, with a “fatal event rate” almost twenty times higher than Southwest Airlines. But the closest Cubana flight took off from Toronto, and the worst option for getting there was first the so-called China bus to New York and then Greyhound to Toronto, both of which had plenty of tales of breakdown and catastrophe. And I liked the idea of starting from home on familiar highways, roads I’d taken a hundred times that would lead me from the exits of the New Jersey Turnpike to the peaks of the Andes and the plateaus of Asia, a continuous chain of machines and expanding experience and stories that would ultimately bring me back home.

Shaking loose from home took time. I broke my first night rolling through New York State in discomfort, opening my eyes to the sun edging over the horizon above Lake Ontario, frozen solid into a sheet of white. It was fourteen degrees, the city glittering and steaming, with snow three feet deep piled along the streets and sidewalks, and pillars of steam rising from vents and buildings under a hard blue sky. We were an hour late, twelve hours from Manhattan, but I had the feeling of the world sliding past beneath me.

My four-hour flight to Havana on one of the world’s worst airlines was surprisingly easy. An hour before landing, the stewards and stewardesses brought out their luggage and started rifling through the plane, packing anything that wasn’t screwed to the bulkheads. Fistfuls of napkins. Doggie bags of chicken and iceberg lettuce salads. Great handfuls of plastic cutlery. Rolls of toilet paper. Disposable salt and pepper shakers. Prepackaged toilettes. They went through the plane like they’d never see another plastic fork again and maybe never get another meal, which finally made sense when I emerged from the airport. A light rain was sprinkling down on Havana. Five hours before, I’d been in a frigid world of sparkling glass and escalators, but there it was hot. Steamy. Dark, the kind of darkness that only exists in the crevices of the world where there are just enough streetlights to illuminate nothing, each a weak oasis for thousands of frantic, flying insects. Giant puddles were everywhere, Havana’s streets and curbs broken and potholed. Emerging from customs, I’d accepted the hustle of a gypsy taxi driver, and he led me to a Toyota with darkly tinted windows and no door handles. I didn’t like to lose sight of my luggage, but he popped the trunk and insisted it had to be hidden.
“Policia,”
he said. “Eleven million Cubans, five million police!”

I don’t know how he got the car started, but he did, amid great coughing and choking and the thick smell of oil and gas. It had no muffler and we sputtered and roared out of the lot into the dark humidity on three cylinders, past an endless line of people plodding along the pavement like zombies in the darkness and drizzle. “You like reggaeton?” he said, cranking the tape deck so high the distorted music vibrated the door panels. “You pay me now!” he said.

“No,” I said. “When we get to the hotel, I’ll pay you.”

“No gasoline!” he said. “Pay me now.”

“No,” I said again. My luggage was in the trunk; now he wanted his money up front. It didn’t look good.

“We don’t have gas!” he said. “We won’t make it!” I leaned over to look at the gauges. “Broken,” he said. They were all broken, the needles motionless. And he sounded pitiful.

“OK,” I said, “half now, half when we get there.” He swerved into a desolate-looking gas station, poured ten dollars in the tank, and off we roared into the wet blackness of a city that shocked me. It wasn’t the Spanish colonial buildings of the old city turning to dust and being eaten by mold. It wasn’t poverty or people’s lack of material possessions; it was their lust for them, a lust so powerful they’d turned Havana into a city of pimps and prostitutes, a hustler on every corner.

“Hello,” said a young girl named Martha, who appeared next to me on the street in front of the Parque Central the next morning. The sidewalks were crowded, shoulder-to-shoulder, with people stepping gingerly over broken curbs as ’57 Chevys and late-model Chinese motorcycles swirled past. “Where are you from?” she said. “Is this your first time in Cuba?” She was twenty-one and could have been my daughter. In her modest T-shirt and shorts and clean white running shoes, she looked more wholesome and innocent than ninety percent of the women her age on prime-time television. “I teach dancing at a hotel,” she said, “and I like to practice my English. Do you like salsa?”

I said I did.

“There is a most important salsa festival at a famous place, the Rosario Castro, nearby. Would you like to see it?”

“Absolutely!” I said. I followed her around the corner, down a block, and around another corner to an ornate colonial building with a wooden doorway big enough to drive a truck through. We skipped up a broad flight of stone stairs into a bright, airy atrium balcony overlooking a courtyard, with a few plastic tables and a bar. It was noon. Behind a set of glass doors lay an open room, perfect for dancing. But it was empty, the doors locked. “The salsa has not started yet,” she said. “Want a mojito? They’re the best here.”

A woman appeared out of the bathroom. She was short and shaped like a barrel, with a prominent gold tooth and a jagged scar on her wrist. “My friend!” Martha said. The girls hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks. “Buy us a mojito!” Juliana said. “Please!”

We sat down at a table and Martha ordered three mojitos. “Don’t worry,” she said, “since it’s so early I’ll order them weak.”

“You think Martha is pretty?” Juliana said, pinching Martha’s cheek as the mojitos arrived. I wasn’t quite sure what to say, so I said nothing and took a sip; the sweet icy lime and mint was delicious, but the drink contained enough rum to satiate a Marine after a tour of duty in Iraq.

“You want to fuck her?”

Martha smiled. Juliana smiled. “Fucky-fucky!” Juliana said. “Um, no thanks,” I stuttered, suddenly feeling a little cornered.

They both frowned. “But don’t you think Martha is pretty?” Juliana said.

I nodded; I shook my head. “Yes, she’s very pretty,” I said, “but no thanks.”

“OK, but we’re hungry!” Martha said, sucking air from the rapidly depleted mojito through her straw and ordering another round.

I was curious about them, so I bought them a plate of grilled fish and rice to share. They wolfed it down like they hadn’t eaten since last week. Juliana rolled cigars—one hundred a day—and earned 240 pesos a month, ten dollars at the official exchange rate.

“America is great!” they said, shoveling spoonfuls of rice into their mouths. “How about another mojito!”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you get free health care.”

“Ha!” They both almost spit their food out.
“Nada
free! My baby needs an operation,” Martha said. “You gotta give the doctor perfume, shampoo, souvenirs, or else you’ll wait on a list for years. The list is long! There are always people on the list! And the police! They make eight hundred pesos a month and another forty in convertible pesos, twice what a doctor earns.” They wanted more. More money. More mojitos. And: “You sure you don’t want any fucky-fucky?”

In the land of free health care and free education and Che and Fidel on every wall, the Cubans were bobbing and weaving around the system in a desperate quest for convertible currency. I couldn’t relax; if I paused at a bench in a park or slowed my pace along the street, someone tried to sell me her body. Or their sister or girlfriend, or a box of cigars. I couldn’t make sense of Cuba, couldn’t even really see it, and the problem was home and time and the magic of the airplane. Cubana Airlines had plucked me from the icy streets of Canada and plopped me down in Havana a day after leaving home. My body was there but my mind wasn’t. That was the trouble with the typical one- or two-week vacation, especially to anywhere foreign: it took time to wear away that protective sheath, and it was something other people could sense, intuit, in the way I walked, moved, looked, talked. It was like I had a neon sign on my forehead that said
DAZED AND CONFUSED
. It was why, careful and alert to the world as I thought I was, it was only in Cuba that I got suckered into a currency exchange that left me suddenly standing alone in a market holding a wad of useless Cuban pesos. Which was okay; to get into the world, to meet it, didn’t happen overnight. It required a transition of time and space, and in Cuba I was just sort of simmering on the stove.

After four days I was antsy to move, to get deeper in. I was happy to board the Cubana Ilyushin Il-62 bound for Bogotá. Which was crazy: three of the eight Cubana crashes had occurred on flights to Central and South America, one of them on an Il-62 that crashed on takeoff into a Havana neighborhood two miles from the airport, killing all 126 passengers and crew as well as fourteen people on the ground. Not to worry, though, as Cubana’s in-flight magazine addressed the issue head-on, in English. Sort of. “It is like a corollary, which does not have to be demonstrated, for it is deduced from experience: before a plane flight you were concerned … Perhaps you heard that a hurricane is crossing this or that region has put you on guard and fired the mechanism of the silenced, discreet fear that does not show before others but makes you tense. So it is clear that safety is the issue of concern. However that concern is due to your lack of knowledge about the means of transportation you are using and the crew in charge.” Relax, the article said. Cubana’s crews had “been duly certified by prestigious aeronautical institutions,” and the plane itself was “a novel mechanical gadget equipped with … the best systems developed by the human mind, able to laugh at hurricanes or any other atmospheric disturbances.” Never mind that I was heading to a country the very mention of which brought gasps to my family and friends. Guerrillas. Narcos. Kidnappings. But just as flying on the world’s most dangerous airline was oddly pleasant, I suspected the dangers of Colombia were overblown. Americans always thought of their country as the richest, freest, safest place on earth, and of the rest of the world, especially the developing world, as a miasma of despair and crime, a Hobbesian universe of poverty and assaults and bombings and kidnappings and people eking out a living in garbage dumps. I believed it was an exaggerated worry, which was the point, I thought, as I settled into my seat on the Ilyushin, of traveling as I was.

The old Soviet-made airplane’s armrests were cracked and peeling, and my seat-back wouldn’t go forward. The flight attendants weren’t svelte and beautiful like they’d been on the marquee Toronto flight; half were bald and overweight men, and they didn’t give a safety briefing. A guy in back fired up a cigarette before we left the ground. But the Soviets had designed airplanes without profit in mind, and I couldn’t complain: every seat had three feet of legroom, the aisles were wide, and the galley in the center of the plane was twenty feet long. Even better, it was almost empty. The pilot hammered the throttles forward, an overhead bin popped open and a pile of first-aid kits crashed to the floor, and three hours later we slammed onto the pavement of Bogotá. A minute early—and time, I felt, for the real journey to begin.

LIMA, Peru—At least forty-five people died when a packed passenger bus plunged into a ravine in Peru’s southern Andes despite a new campaign by President Alan Garcia to reduce fatal road accidents, police said on Tuesday
.

The bus skidded off a mountain road in Peru’s border region with Bolivia late on Monday night and crashed into a 1,640-foot-deep gorge, probably because the driver was speeding, police officer Julio Apaza said
.

—
Reuters, December 5, 2006

TWO
Hope for Buena Suerte

T
HERE IS NO PLACE
like a South American bus terminal; they feel like the town square because, in a way, they are. At Bogotá’s Terminal Terrestre, I slipped through a metal detector, showed my passport to soldiers in combat fatigues, and passed into a model of low-cost efficiency. Modern, big-city airports always felt sterile, generic, unconnected to place. But here, boys were zooming toy cars across the floor. Short, dark campesinos in cowboy hats looked shy and mystified, and women in heels clicked imperiously across the tile, under the gaze of soldiers and private security guards fingering submachine guns as ticket sellers poked their heads out of little windows touting buses and destinations in rapid-fire, singsong voices.
“Ipiales! Ipiales! Ipiales!”
they shouted, so fast it was one slurred phrase.

“Cuenca! Cuenca! Cuenca!”

In South America there wasn’t much middle ground: few owned cars and only the rich flew. Buses were king. In Bogotá alone, dozens of private companies offered service to every town and village on the continent, a travel network cheaper, more efficient—and far more dangerous—than anything in America.

I felt impatient. I was still on Washington time, still on a fast-paced, get-it-done ethos, used to calls and e-mails and texts, a constant stream of problems and invitations and other people’s needs. It was always like that, I knew, when you set out on a long journey; the classic two-week vacation was never enough time to slough off the dead skin of regular life. In some ways, I’d discovered during years of traveling, home life was like an insulating callus you had to wear off before you could even properly see and absorb the new world around you. I knew that would happen eventually, but meanwhile I had the idea I just wanted to make tracks, to knock back the miles, to go without stopping straight into the heart of the world.

Quito, Ecuador, sounded good, and getting there would take me straight through Colombia to the border of Ecuador, a twenty-hour ride to Ipiales across the Andes and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla country. Avoid traveling at night, the Lonely Planet guide warned, which made traveling at night seem more interesting—and how could you avoid it on a twenty-hour journey? A complex war had been raging for years in Colombia involving leftist guerrillas, right-wing death squads, narcos, and American contractors, but things had rapidly improved and the country was blossoming. Just the week before, soldiers had stormed into Ecuador near where I’d be crossing to attack a FARC base, killing one of its senior commanders. Though six tourists had been kidnapped a few months before on the Pacific coast, the guerrillas were on the defensive. And my sense was that when it came to political disruptions and danger, the crowd knew best—the buses were leaving, people were traveling, and it was a big country.

Worse than guerrillas, though, was the possibility of crashing. The World Health Organization rated Latin American roads the most dangerous anywhere, with 1.2 million people a year killed in road accidents—nearly 3,000 a day. The buses of Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia were particularly legendary for horrific crashes, often involving coaches plunging off cliffs, like the one in Peru in December 2006 in which a packed bus plunged into a 1,640-foot gorge, killing forty-five of the forty-seven passengers. At least Colombia had been making an effort: since 2004, its bus companies were required to post accident and fatality statistics in public view, supposedly making its riders informed consumers. Continental SA, the operators of my bus, had, in the first three months of the year, suffered eighteen accidents with eight injured and six dead. That seemed a lot. I bought a ticket and settled down with a plate of steaming curried chicken and rice and cornmeal wrapped in a banana leaf.

My seatmate out of Bogotá was a round-faced girl named Maria, wearing a white hair band and dangling silver earrings, so shy she could barely look at me. She’d traveled twenty-four hours for work, spent two days in Bogotá, and was now repeating the twenty-four-hour journey home. “I couldn’t fly,” she squeaked, “too much money.”

We rose and fell and swirled through green, rugged, and steep mountains under gray skies that dribbled rain, on well-paved two-lane roads full of
curvas peligrosas
—dangerous curves—and every once in a while I’d catch Maria squeezed against the window staring up at me with as much fright and wonder as if she were sitting next to the Easter Bunny. Between my bad Spanish and her shyness, my attempts at conversation went nowhere. In the middle of the night the rain came harder, pelting down in pitch blackness, and I figured any guerrillas out there in the cold jungle, on land so steep you could barely stand, would be hunkered down. But what if we did hit a roadblock? The FARC had a long habit of taking hostages, from local politicians like Ingrid Betancourt to American contractors to tourists. The thought stuck in my head as we passed an army patrol fanned out along the winding road, armed with M-16s. Maybe I could hide behind luggage in the overhead rack. Would the other passengers rat me out? What if the guerrillas set the bus on fire, as they had done before?

At 4:00 a.m., Maria slipped away, and as it got light I noticed the man across the aisle staring at me. And then, just as we passed another
curva peligrosa
, I saw his hand vigorously moving up and down over his crotch. I turned my head. Guerrillas, mudslides, accidents—it seemed like sex was the only real threat.

A
T THE
C
OLOMBIAN BORDER
I had my passport stamped below a wall of wanted posters of FARC commanders, walked across the San Miguel River into Ecuador, and ten minutes later was seated on a rundown bus bound for Quito, with blue-and-white bunting and dangling tassels over the windows. Over the next six hours two guys in the seat across the aisle sucked down a fifth of Suiza tequila, as
Rambo
, dubbed in Spanish, played on the TV in front of the bus, cranked out over speakers above my head. The bathroom was locked—only for the ladies, said the driver—and mortars flew and bodies exploded and Rambo kicked guys’ heads in. Chick flicks did not play on South American buses, ever, I would eventually learn. As the hours fell away, my body ached and my head pounded from the altitude and no coffee. I was hot, dirty, slimy, hungry, and lonely, and Quito, twenty-six hours after Bogotá, didn’t help. We crawled through raw ugliness, mile after mile of square concrete boxes piled on each other like a modern Anasazi city, amid choking traffic and acrid exhaust, a growing city stretching, cracking open like a stretching, peeling lobster.

I didn’t linger. Quito’s terminal covered three stories, with eighty gates of buses pulling in and out every few minutes. Ticket agents sang their refrains.

“Cuenca, Cuenca, Cuenca!”

“Pedernales!”

The smell of exhaust and gas filled the station, the sounds of clanking horns. In an hour I was on a bus with the Statue of Liberty painted on its side, barreling back into the mountains again, bound the long way to Guayaquil via the coast. The hours passed: the curves, the dips, the climbs, the sudden braking. The constant music and explosions from the television stupefied me and everyone else. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. No one read, and passengers barely spoke; on a bus your seat holds you prisoner. My seatmates were a string of Marias—people traveling unbelievably long rides for short visits with family or for work. Vendors swarmed on board at every stop, hawking grilled corn and hot sodas and Rubik’s Cubes.
“Jugo! Cola! Esta bien!”
A stream of salesmen got on, talked and talked, holding up bottles of little green pills or small pieces of candy. “My product is better!” they all said, walking down the aisle, now filled to standing room only, passing out samples, talking some more, then collecting a few coins or taking the samples back. The thought of selling penny candies or medicines on a moving bus was impossible to imagine; day after day after day, the same spiel, all for pennies.

But I was starting to see something, to understand why there was always a bus to take you wherever you wanted to go, and why those buses were always plunging off cliffs. It wasn’t some inborn South American recklessness, some wild and literal leap of faith for people draped in crosses and bracelets of the saints. It was simple economics. American roads were paved and lined with signs and guardrails because America spent billions of dollars on its infrastructure, money collected in taxes. American buses had good tires and fresh brake pads because regulations required them to, and Americans paid commensurate fares. But, relatively speaking, none of my fellow passengers had any money; they couldn’t afford good roads, good tires, good brakes. If they’d had money, they would have flown. But there were a lot of them, and they were on the move. To make money from people who had none, buses went without maintenance and squeezed every person aboard they could. Drivers drove for hours on end; they fell asleep at the wheel, they drank, they hardly saw their families. The police weren’t paid much money, either; they took bribes from bus companies and drivers instead of forcing them off the road, or even prosecuting reckless drivers. Danger, more than anything else, kept fares low. A week later, five British women would be killed on this same route when a truck sideswiped their bus at dusk. The driver didn’t even shut off the engine; he just fled.

There was no respite.
PELIGRO! REDUSA SU VELOCIDAD AHORA!
read yellow signs that the driver ignored, careening around corners with no guardrails on the edge of 200-foot drops, and mudslides tumbling into the road. Time was money and the amounts were so small here, so hard to come by, death was a risk worth taking.

I had been gone a week, had been on buses for almost fifty consecutive hours, and as the bus descended from the mountains into the hot, humid coastal plains, a world of banana trees and cycads and thatch and sand roads, I felt like I was beginning to wake from a long sleep, the veil between me and the world beginning to fall away. These early buses between big cities were a practice run for later, and I suspected they were easy, a picnic before getting into more remote areas. But they were doing the trick—they were breaking me down, opening me up. I was starting to relax, to feel a rhythm, to surrender that illusion of control; the road was whatever came my way, and that was okay. No, it was more than okay; it was good.

T
HE DEEPER
I
TRAVELED
on these South American buses, the more in harmony I was starting to feel. And I was starting to trust the efficiency of this whole ad-hoc, unregulated system. In Canoa, a sleepy fishing village on the Pacific coast of Ecuador, I stood on a muddy street for only five minutes before a bus scooped me up, depositing me two hours later by a pier in the dusty town of San Vicente, all unpaved streets and unfinished concrete buildings. Twenty of us piled on a long wooden
panga
, paid thirty-five cents, and motored across the bay to Bahía de Caráquez, where I stepped into a waiting pedicab that dropped me five minutes later at a bus departing in minutes for Guayaquil. Though slow and statistically dangerous, travel at this level was as cheap and available as bread. Competition was so fierce, regulation so absent, there were always more buses than you needed, always pedicabs or taxis angling for another fare; you never had to wait, and you never had to worry about food or thirst because there was always a vendor selling something.

From Guayaquil, I rode a single bus twenty-eight hours to Lima. Five hours to New York on the China bus had seemed long, twelve hours to Toronto forever. But twenty-eight hours straight was starting to seem as normal to me as it did to my fellow passengers. And I was hardly even noticing the bus’s condition: torn upholstery, bald tires, heat and humidity and crowds—that was all of a piece with the surrounding countryside. I was still reading Lawrence Osborne, who wanted to find “the end of the earth, a place of true adventure.” Here, on these buses, I was anywhere but at the end of the earth; I felt right smack in its crowded heart, surrounded by everyday people. I was traveling via a series of veins and arteries that didn’t show up on most of the developed world’s anatomy charts.

We tore past flooded fields under a pewter sky, Brahmin cows with long horns and humps standing in water up to their chests, on roads of packed sand and ribbons of blacktop yawning with craters and dirt roads covered in shimmering puddles. In the station that morning I’d noticed a clearly middle-class family seeing its two daughters off; they’d hugged long and hard. Marina, a twenty-four-year-old “food engineer” whose favorite dish was spaghetti, clutched her cell phone while her twenty-one-year-old sister, Vivien, hugged a Latin American edition of
Cosmo
, and they sat across the aisle from me. Marina’s father was from Ecuador, and he owned a shoe factory in Guayaquil; her mother was half Chilean and half Peruvian. They’d had visa problems, and after living twelve years in Lima, her parents and younger siblings had relocated to Guayaquil while Marina and Viviene had stayed behind with their grandmother. They thought nothing of taking the bus twenty-eight hours between cities. “It’s cheap,” Marina said, “and I like to look at the world.” It was a world both big and tiny; my friends and most Americans I knew would be horrified at the idea of such a long bus ride between countries. Yet beyond this marathon slog over mountains and bad roads, she’d seen almost nothing. She’d never been to Cusco, Peru, or Quito, Ecuador, or anywhere else beyond the road we were now on. And to her I was a strange interloper in their little world, and she and her sister peppered me with questions. Was I married? Did I have children? Where was I going? What was America like?

Which was even odder, because Hollywood’s version of America was right there in front of us for hours and hours and hours, on the bus’s TV screen. America was anything but an abstraction. It was literal, vivid, reinforced every time a South American went to the movies or turned on the TV. It was a constant tease, this magical place where everyone was rich and beautiful (not to mention violent), and I tried to imagine what it would be like to watch a daily stream of Colombia—how powerful the idea of that place would become. We watched eight movies, including
Armageddon
and
Resident Evil III
, while inching through the crowded market town of Huaquillas (six-foot-tall plastic flowers; quail eggs, four for a dollar; stilettos and skinny jeans and a whole pig upside down on a hook), and rain in Chiclayo so driving it flooded the streets up to the curbs. In the morning we paused in the hot sun and washed our hair in a concrete trough by the side of the road. “Only seven more hours to Lima!” roared one of the drivers, shaking the water out of his hair like a dog after a bath, before lathering up his armpits. Known as
conductores
in Spanish, the drivers had gold teeth and faded, mystical tattoos on their shoulders. They traded the wheel every five hours and slipped the bus through its seven forward gears like it was all they ever did. Which was true: they drove twenty-eight hours to Guayaquil, spent the night, then returned to Lima before going on to Puno, Bolivia another twenty hours south, before turning around and doing it all over again.